


twenty million miles will never hold me down

by iamsolarflare



Series: fics about my fallen london ocs [2]
Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, as before canon has been bent just slightly to accommodate Some Stuff, namely alex's whole Deal. boy howdy, so help me i do NOT remember what i tagged the last fic as, well more canon ATYPICAL but described to the typical levels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-17 21:53:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29478759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iamsolarflare/pseuds/iamsolarflare
Summary: what's worse than getting assassinated? waking up after getting assassinated.
Relationships: None
Series: fics about my fallen london ocs [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2165280
Kudos: 7





	twenty million miles will never hold me down

**Author's Note:**

> (hold up, just stop for a minute please / i didn't catch your drift / more death than legs on a millipede / and you call it a gift?)

Alex wakes up slowly. Slowly, and in pain -- his legs still feel numb, no doubt a side effect of being poisoned. At least he’s on a soft surface and not in a grave somewhere.

...Which is weird, actually, because out of places people drag you after you’ve been temporarily assassinated, anyplace soft doesn’t tend to be one of them. He can think of maybe one exception… and it’s if the Licentiate he’d chatted with had been hired to send him downriver so his temporarily lifeless body would be much more easily kidnapped.

He grits his teeth. There _had_ been a bit of cosmogone in Lock’s eyes. Dull spark, he’d assumed long since faded, but it was _there._ And he’s heard in passing about what the New Sequence does to people; kidnapping would most _certainly_ not be beneath them. The humming in his head grows louder. _Fuck._

He doesn’t want to open his eyes, but at the same time, whatever hell he’s about to get into -- the music in his head pounding, wordless and tuneless, crashing like waves on a shore -- he’s doomed either way. Might as well go out facing it. He takes a deep breath in and opens his eyes.

He’s in his lodgings. Specifically, he’s in the cramped portion of the decommissioned steamer that serves as his study. It’s a mess of scattered paper and books and lockboxes full of semi-valuables, but he can tell just at one glance that it’s the same exact mess he’d left behind him when he’d gone to the Forgotten Quarter, save for some of it having been pushed aside to clear an easier path to the couch he slept on most nights.

Okay, so not _quite_ kidnapped. That’s good, puts him at ease a little, but it doesn’t explain why the song in his head is getting louder by the second, a choir of a million and no voices, keening brightly like it’s calling out to something and he just happens to be in the way. Alex grumbles and shuts his eyes again, tries to pretend this is just a migraine and not some horrible otherworldly noise that won’t leave his damn head-

“Hey, _Haunt,”_ a voice says, and it feels like his stomach has dropped out of his body and onto the floor. The voice sounds like him. And it sounds like a voice in the choir in his head. He grabs for something to use as a weapon -- a heavy book isn’t going to help, but at least he has something to _hold_ now -- and opens his eyes.

He’s seen her before. Normally in crowds, a brief flicker of red-orange hair around the rooftops, dashing past as the sound in his head briefly gets louder. She’s been hunting him down, as much as you can hunt _anyone_ down in London. The person at the other end of the room -- her feet propped up on his desk, no regard for the papers he’d had there, grinning at him with pale purple eyes -- looks like she could be his twin, if not for her lacking a shirt and his lacking more tattoos than empty skin.

“Get out of my house,” Alex says, teeth gritted even more than he’d do for the New Sequence. He doesn’t know this person, he doesn’t know her name, and good gods he doesn’t _want_ to know anything else about her.

“Hm,” the not-him says, “I don’t think I will.”

He can’t _focus_ with this damned noise in his head. He tries to anyway. “At least get your feet off my desk.”

Not-him makes a soft _hmph_ in annoyance, but she takes her feet off the desk and puts them on the ground, leaning forward on her elbows instead. “You’re real tricky to track down, you know that? You’d think the Song would be more help, but you are _so_ easy to lose in a crowd.”

“Thanks for the lovely compliment,” he responds dryly. It’s true, he’s gotten good at losing people, and rust-red hair will eventually blend into the environment if you duck into the right part of Spite where the smog is thickest. But learning that for _sure_ she’s been following him doesn’t bode well, and neither does that offhand mention of something called the _Song._

...It can’t be, right? It can’t be.

Alex adjusts the heavy book in his hand. Some sort of volume on the Forgotten Quarter, like most of his books. Maybe a mostly falsified account of the Second City; he’s got a lot of those in particular. “You know where I live. Now leave.”

“Prickly, arentcha?” Not-him’s smile just grows wider, twisted and mocking. The sound in his head won’t _shut up,_ humming some horrible cacophony. “You _sure_ you don’t want to know why I’m here?”

“Poor Edward probably sent you.”

She laughs. “Who? No.”

And then she stands up, and waves one hand, and -- there’s a sword in her hand, it wasn’t there before, did her tattoos just _move,_ the music in his head is _screaming_ but it’s only half danger, the other half is horrible joy -- Alex falls off the couch in his haste to get away from not-him. 

He’s struggling to connect the dots just as much as he’s struggling to deal with this brush with mortal danger. Something is _wrong_ . He hasn’t left any mirrors uncovered, right? No, even if he _had_ done that, her eyes aren’t that sleepy, sickly green. Can’t be something from Parabola without a trace of that. No trace of any Neath-colors, come to think of it.

“You’re a _smart_ man, Haunt,” she says, twirling the sword, “you can figure it out. The answer’s practically screaming in your face, _isn’t_ it?”

Screaming in his face? No, that can’t be right, he can’t focus on _anything_ with this damn song splitting his head in two. Not… unless that’s what she’s talking about. If she’s talking about the music. She’d said the Song.

His knees feel like they’re about to give way, downright buckle from under him. _Something_ is sabotaging him from inside his own head and he can hear it loud and clear. Not-him raises her sword and advances. She’s going to kill him. She’s going to kill him and wherever he goes, it’s _not_ going to be downriver this time. Alex stumbles back to the door and pulls it open, dashes updeck before his legs give out from under him.

Someone’s standing there. Between him and a clear escape.

That same plain-faced man with the faint hint of cosmogone in his eyes. The one that smells like gant and looks like a million other people, appearance just a bit too dedicatedly plain. Lock.

The music in his head -- the Song -- reaches a new level of cacophony, decibels louder than he can process. Lock is saying something, he can see the man’s lips moving, but he can’t make out what’s being _said_ for the life of him.

Well, he’d rather get stabbed by Lock at this rate. He closes his eyes, mouths out _help_ uselessly -- or maybe he screams it, it’s not like he can _hear_ anything -- and goes limp on the ground. He’s there for less than two seconds before someone grabs his arm (rough workman’s gloves), hauls him up, slinging his arm over their shoulder. He can hear a blade being drawn faintly.

“Alex. Alex, talk to me.”

Lock. His voice cuts through the noise like a sharp knife through flesh.

Alex struggles to stand upright, practically leaning his whole body weight against Lock at this point. He opens his eyes to try and get a sense of balance, maybe figure out where he’s going to get shanked (gotten shanked already?), but… Lock’s sword isn’t pointed at him, and it’s clean. Clean, and faintly dripping with something that drips onto the wood flooring and burns right through.

“Careful,” Lock mutters, trying to readjust Alex’s weight, “there’s Cantigaster on this. Don’t want that getting into your system.”

“Aren’t you just going to stab me with it?”

Lock’s facial expression is genuinely confused. “No?”

And then not-him bursts above deck as well, her eyes glinting with fury, sword that shouldn’t exist glimmering in her hands. _“Stop running.”_

Alex takes a step back due to instinct and immediately falls off of Lock’s shoulder and onto the ground, twisting his ankle as he does so. The pain barely registers through his haze of panic, but what _does_ register is Lock stepping out directly in front of him, sword in his left hand, right hand hovering by his side.

Not-him stops short, narrows her eyes at the person between them. “Who’s _this,_ Haunt? I didn’t think you had enough money for a _bodyguard.”_

“I didn’t think Alex had a sister out for blood, but here we are,” Lock responds evenly. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“He’s _my_ flesh and blood.”

“He’s my friend. The blood of the covenant is worth more.” There is no flourish in Lock’s ready stance; he just shifts slightly. The humming in Alex’s head has changed its tune. Apprehension.

“You know what? I’m just going to kill you and _then_ deal with him.” Not-him lunges. Alex shuffles back a few feet more, having nothing better to do than watch what he can only assume is about to be a Black Ribbon level duel for who gets to take his life.

A gunshot.

Not-him presses one hand to her side, hissing in pain. Lock steps forward, twirls his sword and sends her blade flying into the ocean, and shoots again. His face is as calculatedly impassive as a polite churchgoer’s, showing no sign of any strain except mild concentration.

Not-him stumbles back. Lock closes the gap with ruthless efficiency, aiming the gun slightly over her shoulder and driving his sword directly through her heart while she’s occupied -- and just like that, she’s _gone_ . Not dead, no, she just _vanishes_ into thin air.

“Huh,” Lock says, pistol already back in his pocket, shaking the blood off his sword and sheathing it. “Cantigaster doesn’t normally _vaporize_ people. You don’t happen to own a full-length mirror, do you?”

Alex laughs nervously. “No. No, she -- she wasn’t from Parabola, I can tell you that much.”

“Wasn’t New Sequence either,” Lock says, staring at the spot where not-him had been a few seconds ago. “I’d know.”

Oh, right. Between the splitting headache due to some horrible otherworldly music in his head and a weird doppelganger trying to kill him, Alex had completely forgotten about the weird cosmogone hue in Lock’s eyes and the fact that he’d _initially_ suspected the man had killed him to kidnap him for nefarious purposes. He backs up further.

“Relax,” Lock says, clearly catching Alex’s apprehension. “Those _bastards_ are just about top of the list when it comes to people I’m not interested in working for.” He crouches down and extends a hand to Alex. “Here.”

He takes the hand, and Lock hauls him to his feet, shrugging so that Alex’s one arm is around his shoulder again. “I don’t know what the hell kind of thing that _was,_ ” Lock says, “but I felt my sword go through. She’s not coming back, unless she’s Elder Continent, in which case it’ll maybe be about three weeks and that’s _plenty_ of time to move.”

Alex wheezes, more out of exhaustion with the situation than any actual strain, and lets Lock help him down back into his study, which has somehow not been all that overturned despite not-him attacking. He falls back onto the couch gratefully.

“So,” he says, putting the book he’d grabbed five minutes or so ago (which, as it turns out, is in fact _A True Historie Of The Second Citie,_ a total piece of hack writing) on the ground and trying to make himself comfortable. “Not that I’m complaining -- I think you may well have just saved my life, and I’m _not_ just talking about going downriver -- but why were you in my house, exactly?”

“Technically not _in_ your house, was I?” Lock has somehow found the one section of wall unoccupied by paper and is now leaning against it in lieu of actually sitting anywhere -- kind of a relief, given the last person to take a chair in here was, well, not-him. “I dragged you home pretty shortly after you went downriver. Client didn’t pay me to do anything other than put you out of commission for a couple days, and I, ah…”

“You what?” Alex leans forward, staring at Lock.

“You mentioned something about music in your head. And _you’re_ not from the Elder Continent either, and I only know of _one_ thing that puts music in your head.” Lock’s expression is stormy, his glare focused on the floor with such intensity that Alex half expects the papers on the ground to burst into flame. “I have _history_ with the New Sequence. History I don’t care to have anyone else repeat. And I certainly didn’t want them getting to you while you were asleep, so I, well.”

“You kept watch over my dead body. Which, might I point out, _you_ caused.” Alex snorts.

“I thought there was only one entrance on this ship,” Lock says, grimacing. “I didn’t think you’d get attacked.”

“There _is_ only one entrance,” Alex responds. “She appeared out of thin fucking air, Lock, I don’t know what to tell you. Music in my head -- not New Sequence related, I promise you that much -- hit a fever pitch and all of a sudden she was just sitting at my desk.”

Lock’s face curls into confusion. “And you’re _sure_ you don’t own a full-length mirror?”

“I may be an idiot, but I’m not a _vain_ idiot. Like I said. She definitely wasn’t from Parabola.” He takes a deep breath in. “I don’t think she was _from_ … anywhere. The Neath, the Elder Continent, Parabola, Arbor, the Zee, the Surface -- hell, the _Avid Horizon._ No, I think she came from… somewhere that has different rules.”

“Sounds a hell of a lot like Parabola to me,” Lock says, but he doesn’t argue the point any further. “Could have interrogated her, I suppose, but you looked like you were maybe two minutes away from needing a trip to the Royal Beth.”

“Make that one minute.” Alex shudders. “I won’t be sleeping well tonight, that much is for sure.” He pauses. “Lock, uh. You called me your friend?”

Lock’s expression falls; he looks almost guilty. “Sorry. In my experience that’s the fastest way to get people to shove off if they’re looking to avoid a fight. I didn’t mean to overstep.”

Alex smiles, gets to his feet shakily, extends a hand to Lock. “No. No, I… could use a friend like you, if I’m being honest. I can’t say I have _much_ influence, but I can keep an ear out for you if you’d like to find any New Sequencers to vanish?”

Lock laughs and takes his hand, shakes it with a smile on his face. “You certainly don’t have to, but the offer is appreciated. Good to meet you, Alex. This time without-”

“-You were about to say ‘without the murder,’ weren’t you?”

“...I was. And it would have been phenomenally hypocritical of me, given that I just stabbed some sort of strange doppelganger of yours on your behalf.”

Alex shakes his head. “How about this, Lock? It’s good to meet you on friendly terms this time. I look forward to working together.”

Lock’s smile is thin, but it’s warm and genuine. “Yeah. That’ll do.”

**Author's Note:**

> your honor, they're friends. anyway hi i wrote this in a haze of having just watched the latest ENA episode and also thinking about fallen london and general horror writing a lot, so this one's a Time.


End file.
